John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updikewas an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 March 1932
CountryUnited States of America
reality guarantees-that self
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
self examination fiction
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
selfish decision made
I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
life years self
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
light self doe
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
selfish party boys
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
self consciousness turns
A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
self creative use
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
art self work-ethic
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
selfish light opposites
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
self essentials literature
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
acceptance self perfection
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
criticism failure threatens
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
appeal primitive secretly television
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.